Contemporary media systems employ digitally compressed and transported audio and video streams, which typically require buffering during encoding and transmitting at the source and buffering for receiving and decoding at the destination. Buffering inherently includes some amount of delay. In a situation where the media system directly connects to a single endpoint such as a television and/or speakers, there are various adequate solutions to problem of synchronizing the audio output with the video output, because the same endpoint device buffers both sets of data.
A different problem results when multiple output endpoints are being used. For example, consider the same audio being played back on a personal computer and also transmitted to a stereo system in the next room, or to a set of (e.g., wireless) remote speakers that handle such transmitted data. In such a situation, the buffering can cause different amounts of delay on each endpoint. As can be readily appreciated, when a user can simultaneously hear (or see) two signals that are out of synchronization, a highly annoying user experience results.
Inserting synchronization-related codes such as timing signals or the like into the streamed data for each endpoint to process in order to stay synchronized is not an adequate solution in many instances. For one, there are numerous device manufacturers, and no existing transmission protocol standards allow for the transmission of such codes. In the event that such a standard is developed, it would not work with legacy endpoints, and would be costly to implement in many circumstances. For example, any compatible device would have to include the correct processing mechanisms that know how to react to the coding to properly synchronize, and the codes (e.g., timing signals) would have to be extracted from the data in the same way at each endpoint or those timing signals themselves would be out of synchronization.
What is needed is a mechanism that keeps multiple audiovisual-related endpoints synchronized. The mechanism may desirably require limited responsibility and expense at the endpoint.